Scenes from the Festival

The Spirit of Black Mountain College Festival, that is, which took place at Lenoir-Rhyne University in September, 2008. The Arts Council of North Carolina recorded many of the performances and readings, and apparently the recordings are now up on YouTube. A new friend who was exploring the web in search of some of my work came across them, and kindly let me know.

Not sure why I chose to read all new, unpublished work this day in Hickory, but there's no denying I did. The poems have changed a bit in the years since.

There are also readings by Michael Rumaker, Lee Ann Brown, Lisa Jarnot, Thomas Meyer, and Thomas Raine Crowe from the festival. Cool, extremely cool.

Do Tell

Now it can be told! One of the things I've been busy with these past few weeks while I've been off-line is a festival; it will take place July 11th a few miles down I-26 from Asheville in Hendersonville, NC. The Do Tell Festival is more than a bit unusual in that it will include both poetry and storytelling, two ancient arts of verbal performance. The poets will include Thomas Rain Crowe, Laura Hope-Gill, Sebastian Matthews, Thomas Meyer, and yours truly - a diverse bunch if ever there was one - and the storytellers cover quite a range as well, from teller of traditional Jack Tales Badhair Michael Williams, to Candler Willis, who covers the lore of Abraham Lincoln, and Lloyd Arneach, who tells tales from the Cherokee tradition. And others. Not quite something for everyone, perhaps, but dang close.

And if you haven't been to Hendersonville lately, it'll provide a good excuse to visit. It seems to be getting lots more lively; it's not just about apples anymore.

Check the website. You might want to put it on your calendar.

Wordplay: A Visit with Thomas Meyer

Last fall's Spirit of Black Mountain College festival at Lenoir-Rhyne University had many pleasures; one of the greatest, for me, was hearing new work by the very fine poets assembled there, some of whom I hadn't seen in years. When imaginations so inventive gather, one expects surprises. And there were surprises galore, indeed.

No one's work surprised me more, though, than that of Thomas Meyer. One of the events drew him, Lisa Jarnot, and me together for a performance at the Belk Centrum, and when Lisa followed Thomas to the stage after his reading, she said simply "That was a great poem." It had been stunning; some momentary voice in my consciousness was certainly glad I didn't have to follow it.

The audio of that memorable occasion will someday be available, I am promised, and when it is I'll play it for your amusement, Gentle Reader, and your delight.

Not willing to wait for that day to hear the work again, though, last week I headed over the ridges and visited Tom in Scaly Mountain, at Skywinding Farm, the home he shared for many years with Jonathan Williams, to record a conversation and a reading of the poems he'd brought to Hickory. Tom's a consummate host, of course, so it was after lunch and coffee that we pushed the dishes aside, I booted the trusty laptop, set up the mics, and we recorded what became Sunday's show.

And it's quite a show - not because of any contribution on my part to the conversation, but because Tom read much more than the work that had caught our ears last fall. That piece, now titled "Kintsugi", after the Japanese technique of repairing broken ceramics with gold, proved to be the first movement of a suite of three poems, and he read all three, including the companion pieces "Endings" and "Open Window". Tune in, and you'll find yourself embarked on a remarkable journey.

The music for the show suggested itself during our conversation. The show opens with the polyrhythmic "Abimenijoe", a Balinese Gender Wayang recorded in September, 1941, by the Fahnestock South Sea Expedition, just before the Pacific world was roiled into a different epoch by World War II; the first break features "Come Into Leaf, Thou Forest", a choral work by Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares from their 1988 release, A Cathedral Concert; the second break features an excerpt from Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn", performed by Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra; and the show ends with the Swedish-Norwegian chanteuse from North Dakota, Peggy Lee, singing with the Benny Goodman Orchestra on their 1941 single "Where or When" - which fades, after my goodbye-for-this-week routine, into a solo piano version of the song by Dave Brubeck.

Oh, and not that it matters in the great scale of things, but my contributions to the conversation sometimes sound as though they are emerging from the bottom of a well. It seems that one of the mics I was using had gain problems that I didn't notice during the recording; fortunately, it was mine, and not Tom's. It's one of the hazards of field recording that there are no do-overs, no second takes after the fact. The event has ended, it's location a hundred miles back down the road. I fixed the imbalance between the two channels as best I could, but, as is often the case, the repair has left its own artifacts. Sometimes you'll just have to imagine that I'm actually there, in the same room, five or six feet from Thomas Meyer, talking with him about poetry on a sunny February afternoon, whatever your ears seem to tell you.

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Update: Previous posts on Tom are here and here; both deal with his translation of the daodejing; another post deals with his previous appearance on Wordplay (you'll find a link to that show in the Wordplay catalog). Or click on the label to get the full trove of posts that refer to Tom and his work.

The Spirit of Black Mountain College ... coming right up

This weekend brings the Spirit of Black Mountain College festival at Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory. The festival, celebrating the 75th anniversary of Black Mountain College's founding, kicks off Thursday evening with a reception and a reading by Galway Kinnell, and runs through Saturday. Along the way, a mix of events, a melange of dance, music, visual arts and, of course, poetry. It's really a treat to be joining Lee Ann Brown, Thomas Meyer, Michael Rumaker (who'll actually read as a poet, though he's best known as a novelist and memoirist), Lisa Jarnot, Thomas Rain Crowe, Ted Pope, and the rest of the large company for all the brouhaha.

Here's my schedule, if you'd like to catch up with me or check out my work while you're there:

Friday:

10:15 am in Belk Centrum: Weekend overview with all performers

2:00 pm in Belk Centrum: Reading/Performance with Thomas Meyer and Lisa Jarnot. (This looks to be my main reading)

3:00 pm in Belk Centrum: I'll be the facilitator for a panel discussion: "The Poets of Black Mountain College". Is form nothing more than the extension of content?

5:00 pm at the Lenoir-Rhyne dining hall: Ed Dorn's Gunslinger Book I (a readers theater performance with Thomas Meyer, Lee Ann Brown, Lisa Jarnot, Thomas Rain Crowe, et al.)

6:00 pm at the Hickory Museum of Art: Opening reception

8:00 pm at Hickory Museum of Art: Introduction of Poets

Saturday:

11:00 am at Hickory Museum of Art: Workshop (this is still billed in the online schedule as a reading, so I'm not quite sure which it is - but I'll be there either way).

2:00 pm in Belk Centrum: "Remembering Jonathan Williams (1921-2008): A Tribute". Thomas Meyer is coordinating this; I'll read a couple of Jonathan's poems, and speak from my memories of him.

And then I become an audience member, and spectator, hopping between shows and events. There will be some wonderful performances, I'm sure, and the exhibits will include some great pieces; much of the Black Mountain College Museum +Art Center's collection, for example, will be on display. If you're within range, do try to catch some of the festivities.

Wordplay welcomes Thomas Meyer ...

Not actually, mind you; he didn't drive all the way over from Scaly Mountain to sit down in the studio this past Sunday. But he didn't have to, since I'd recorded several of his readings in recent years, and had sat down with him in another studio back in 2006 to talk about (among other things) his translation of the classic Chinese text daode jing.

Tom's a terrific poet, of course, so it was great fun to revisit the occasions I'd recorded. Those readings included one from September 30, 2005 at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, in which he gave, I thought, a really good overview of his work, from the poems collected in At Dusk Iridescent, to the long poem Coromandel (on line at the link), to his translation of the dao, which was then unpublished. He came back to the Center in March, 2006, though, after the dao's publication by Flood Editions, to present the text in full, so I used that recording for the show, as well as a snip from that interview we'd done the same day, rather than the excerpts from the previous fall.

When Hillsborough poet Jeffery Beam visited Asheville in July, he brought along several tapes featuring readings by, or interviews with, Jonathan Williams. One of those tapes, from a midsummer, 1994, reading at The Literary Institute, Muker, Swansdale, Yorkshire, Great Britain, also included a brief reading by Tom; I opened the show with it, since Tom hadn't featured its material in the 2005 foray back into his earlier work. Thanks, Jeffery.

Since we were beginning the show in Yorkshire, I used Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia on Greensleeves" for the show's opening theme, and honored the multivoiced Coromadel from 2005 with "Taboehgan" by the Balinese Gamelan Semar Pegulingan (recorded in 1941, and available on Music for the Gods from the Library of Congress). Tom had said he loved Bollywood soundtracks, but I didn't have any handy, so I closed with Ali Akbar Khan's "Blessings of the Heart, Part 2", from 1993's Garden of Dreams. Khan has composed for film scores throughout his long career, after all, and I bet a few were Bollywood productions.

Oh, you might notice that the show that's now available from the WPVM archive is several minutes longer than Worplay's hour, so I should confess that it's not the show that aired. If you happened to be listening live, you had an experience that the station's rickety archiving system failed to record. When I came back to the station Sunday evening to re-produce the show, I included a little more of the music than I could squeeze into our live slot.

Give it a listen.

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15 September update: The show's now up on the ibiblio archive, here.
And here's a catalog of other Wordplay programs.



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Photo of Tom by Reuben Cox

Loco with the Logodaedalists

(Click for a legible version)


Saturday evening I'll be joining a host of other poets and friends of Jonathan Williams to read from his work and celebrate his life at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.

The readers have been corresponding for several weeks now to declare their preferences for poems or prose selections that define Jonathan in his particularity for them. I find that I'm reminded of the old Buddhist teaching story about the blind men and the elephant; for some of us Jonathan was a winnowing basket, for others a plowshare, for others a column. It'll be interesting to hear these takes on Jonathan converge; I'm hoping we get close to providing a glimpse of the whole elephant before we're done.

Loco Loodaedalist
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
56 Broadway, Downtown Asheville
Saturday 19 July, 2008
Doors at 7:30, reading at 8:00

Jonathan Williams: Toward a Second Look

What's the old maxim? Don't speak ill of the dead? There's a curious metamorphosis that takes place after death, besides the body's moldering. If we believe less these days in a reckoning before a juridical God (or Pluto, or Osiris), we know there's still a reckoning of a different sort, one that affects not our afterlife in the world beyond, but our afterlife within the community and culture of which we're each a part. For those who lead public lives, especially our artists and writers, the departure sometimes offers a moment of public reconnection, new recognition that what the artist has done has significance and resonance, beyond whatever claims the contending artist might have made for it. Or not. And sometimes ... well, Melville's death was little noted in 1891, eliciting but one obituary; re-appraisal, and the recognition of achievement it provided, had to wait for thirty years and the publication of Raymond Weaver's 1921 biography; his edition of Melville's last work, the short novel Billy Budd, in 1924; and texts like D. H. Lawrence's 1923 Studies in Classical American Literature.

The recent death of Jonathan Williams, late of Scaly Mountain, near Highlands, seems happily to have spurred the world to give his work a more immediate second look. Ron Silliman, one of the leading conceptual poets of the generation that came of age just after Donald Allen's 1960 anthology New American Poetry had reshaped the landscape of American verse, recalled in a post after Williams' death that he'd heralded Jubilant Thicket, his last collection, as "one of those absolute must-have books of poetry." And the Electronic Poetry Center, one of the primary Internet source sites for poets who appeared (as Jonathan did) in that anthology, as well as their spiritual progeny, has now created a page for him with an array of links to the small part of his work that's made it to the web, and to a slew of articles, obituaries, and appreciations* that help provide context for the encounter with his work. Such notice, however belated, is always welcome to the kin, friends, and fans who survive.

A curious fact about Mr. Williams, of course, is that he didn't start out to be a poet at all. When he came to Black Mountain College in 1951, it was to study with photographer Harry Callahan, who was teaching in the summer session. Charles Olson, who headed the college and taught courses in writing, cosmology, and "the present", recognized Williams' great gift as a writer, though, and - shazam! - writing soon became for Williams the primary creative focus. He'd founded Jargon Press by the end of 1951, when he was just twenty-two; he'd go on to publish under the Jargon imprint roughly a hundred titles by the brilliant wildcat pioneers and outliers of American arts and letters in the decades after the college had ceased to exist.

Fortunately, he continued to use his camera, too; thanks to him, we have images of many of the denizens of Black Mountain College during their time together there - Charles Olson, for instance, sitting at his desk in his quarters at the college writing an early Maximus poem. And Robert Creeley, who used one of Jonathan's photos of him on the cover of 1969's The Charm, which collected poems from the Black Mountain era. Poet Thomas Meyer, Jonathan's longtime partner in Jargon, said recently that Jonathan had shot thousands of photos over the years, many with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera that used a medium format film - and so provided negatives with much higher resolution than those from 35mm cameras. He later favored the Polaroid SX-70, whose print format was of a similar size. When Jonathan and Thomas would join friends for dinner, Jonathan would often use the Polaroid to shoot everyone present and document the antics of the occasion. In the fall, he'd go through the stacks of shots from the previous year, and mount them in albums. He'd also assemble slide shows of whatever images had caught his eye - poets, landscapes, architecture, landscapes, art works. Williams, according to Meyer, continued taking photos through 2004. By 2006, when the transparencies were archived at Yale's Beinecke Library, he'd amassed "several thousand", including a "core collection" of about 2400. Two of his published titles, 1979's Portrait Photographs and A Palpable Elysium, published in 2000, drew on this vast photographic work.

This month Asheville's Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center will help us give Jonathan's work as a photographer the same sort of second look that his poetry has recently begun to receive. On June 13th, the Center will open a show of Williams photos, many of them fine black and white prints that beautifully register and find form in occasions during his years at Black Mountain. Others, some of them in the vibrant saturated colors with which he later loved to work, feature Black Mountain artists and writers, like M. C. Richards and Robert Duncan, who came into the orbit of his eye after their years at the college. Williams became, I think, a master of the post-modern portrait, situating his subjects in vivid color fields or apparent contexts that give the images depth and dimension.

But take this opportunity to give the work a look for yourself.

The show will be up at the Center through September 20th.

Jonathan made it clear that he wanted no memorial services - but while the show is up, the Center will also celebrate Williams' work as a poet on July 19th. Plans for that event were developing at last Sunday's "life celebration" at Scaly Mountain. More about it in a future note.


If You Go:
What: Photographs by Jonathan Williams. Visions of Wonderment + Affection
Where: Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 56 Broadway, Downtown Asheville When: June 13th through September 20th , 2008, Opening with a reception on June 13th, 7:00pm
Admission: $3, free for members of the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center; the reception is free.
More Info: (828) 384-5050 or online at www.blackmountaincollege.org

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The photo: Jonathan Williams, Beauty and the Beast: Joel Oppenheimer and Francine du Plessix Gray, BMC, 1951, gelatin silver print, 21.75 x 21.25 inches, BMCM+AC Collection, Gift of the artist.

*Including an earlier post here. Other posts on Jonathan are here and here.

This post appeared in slightly different form in the June, 2008 issue of Rapid River.

Jonathan Williams 1929-2008

Jonathan Williams, one of this country's literary treasures, died last night in Highlands from complications of a systemic infection. He had been ill for some time, and had been receiving treatment for peripheral neuropathy for the last several years. As Ron Silliman notes today, Jonathan was the last survivor of the Black Mountain poets featured in Donald Allen's 1962 New American Poetry; fortunately, other Black Mountain writers not included in that anthology, notably Michael Rumaker, still flourish.

Jonathan was an extraordinary poet, of course, and perhaps equally remarkable as a publisher (his Jargon Press was one of the absolutely critical undertakings in American poetry of the last sixty years) and a photographer. He also was a long time collector of vernacular art, and a show from his collection, curated by Tom Patterson, is currently up at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts in Boone, North Carolina. It runs until June, for those who'd like to get a glimpse of work that caught Colonel Williams' eye.

Jonathan was generous with his time and attention, and proved gracious and amiable host when I asked in 2005 if I might interview him about his career and work. The afternoon at Skywinding, Jonathan and Tom Meyer's home, was an illuminating feast of insight, history, and the various delights of imagination - and Tom made one of the best lasagne's I've ever had, to boot. Jonathan gave a few readings here in Western North Carolina after the publication of Jubilant Thicket, his selected poems (Silliman: "one of those absolute must-have books of poetry"), and I managed to record one of those, at City Lights Books in Sylva, as well. I'll be listening to those recordings this week, and putting together a memorial show for this coming Sunday's Wordplay.

Jonathan was probably best known for his humorous work, and he did humor well - a rare talent these days. In the course of his long career (I almost wrote "careen"; he moved right along), though, he explored many territories of poetry, from the visual (see the original edition of Blues & Roots/Rue & Bluets), through the procedural (portions of 1964's Mahler were composed by using a "Hallucinatory Deck", "a personal alchemical deck of 55 white cards on which are written 110 words, - the private and most meaningful words of my poetic vocabulary"), to the poem of found or discovered language. One of my favorites, though, is one of his more conventional poems ("conventional" at least in the context of The New American Poetry):

The Deracination

definition: root

"a growing point,
an organ of absorption, an aerating organ,
a good reservoir, or
means of support"

veronica glauca, order Compositae,
"these tall perennials with
corymbose cymes of bright-purple heads of
tubular flowers
with conspicuous stigmas"

I do not know the Ironweed's root,
but I know it rules September

and where the flowers tower
in the wind there is a burr of
sound empyrean ... the mind
glows and the wind drifts...

epiphanies pull up
from roots

epiphytic, making it up

out of the air.

Jonathan, hale and farewell.

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Updates, March 19th:

There's a bit more about The Colonel a couple of posts up.

The memorial show for Jonathan will stream this Sunday, March 23rd, at 2:00 PM EDT from the WPVM web site. It will be available as an on-demand stream and podcast Monday, the 24th, from the station archive page. Shows are listed alphabetically, so just scroll down to find Wordplay.

Another update, March 24:

The reading at City Lights is now available from the Archive page at WPVM; it'll be there through next Sunday, March 30th (at least), and will eventually find a home in the online Wordplay archives, wherever they may be hosted. I'll update again as that project get closer to realization. Production notes for the show are up here. Enjoy.

And more: Poked around over at the old Eden Hall, and found some earlier notes about readings by Jonathan and Thomas Meyer at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. They're here.

And yet more, 5 April, 2008: The reading by Jonathan has now found a permanent home in the wonderful PennSound audio archive, here.

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Photograph by Roger Manley, who collaborated with JW on St. Eom in the Land of Pasaquan: The Life & Times and Art of Eddie Owens Martin. It was originally posted at the Jargon site, though I can't locate it there now.

Another birthday: Thomas Meyer ...

... who turns sixty-one today.

You certainly brought me good Fortune
But that is just what I regret, my success. The worst thing is once to have been happy.
A mouth and some yarrow stalks. Two witches dance for rain. Future foretelling.
A dish covered but full. Everything that was predicted comes about.
What you want will be done. Your heart's desire is the plan from now on.

(A few lines from the very fine "The Magician's Assistant", which appeared recently in Damn the Caesars, Volume III.)

Many more, Mr. Meyer.


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Here's a previous post on Meyer's translation of the daode jing , and a link to other posts on his work. Though things have been quiet there lately, the Musings page over at the Jargon Society remains worth delving into.

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The photo of Thomas Meyer is by Reuben Cox.

Gads! Tom Meyer now 60

To help him celebrate, why not scoot over to Jargon's site to read some of his work - the wonderful essay "On Being Neglected," for example, which I've returned to many times.

[A] good friend once confessed how wonderful it felt to edit an anthology, and not include work of his own. Though not a lesson our society proffers, there is good sense in making one's work a refuge, rather than a display, the self evident as opposed to the self-proclaimed, to dare not to be first, even in disappointment. Consider this: Hiding one's light under a bushel is actually a strength, not a weakness — the authority of accomplishment. That's nearly unthinkable here and now in these United States, despite all our spiritual aspirations.

In taking the measure of his own path, he casts light into byways anyone committed to the work of writing will find it more than useful to explore. If you're a poet, you'd do well to read it, print it, and keep it close at hand to read again.

And there's more to be found there through the Musings page - including files you can stream or download of Tom reading Coromandel, his recent long poem, the text of his translation of the Katha Upanishad, and his memoir of artist Sandra Fisher.

And there are articles on Tom's translation of the daode jing at NatureS here, here, and here.

Happy birthday, Tom. Like they say, many more.

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The photo of Thomas Meyer is by Reuben Cox.

Tom Meyer on the Airwaves

When Tom Meyer came to Asheville in March to read his new translation of the daode jing at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, I managed to record an interview with him across the street at WCQS. Today part of it aired on WPVM; it'll be broadcast again Tuesday at 6:00 PM and Wednesday at 7:00 AM, and is available as an internet stream from the station website.

It's also available as a download this week; just use the "Archive" link and scroll down to "WordPlay."

Enjoy.

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The photo of Thomas Meyer is by Reuben Cox.

More Translations by Tom Meyer

Hillsborough poet Jeffery Beam writes to note that Tom Meyer's translation of the Katha Upanishad is available on the Jargon Society website, and to pass along a reminder from John Martone that the I Ching is there also. I've just seen the Upanishad, but have enjoyed the translation of the I Ching for several years. Do check them out.

While you're there, there's also a good account of the Jargon project through the years by Jeffery. Elsewhere on the site (sorry, I can't locate it at the moment), there is (or perhaps was?) a wide-ranging interview with Jonathan Williams, Jargon's proprietor and author of the fine Jubilant Thicket and, of course, many other titles. Jeffery's got a new collection of poems, Gospel Earth, up at Longhouse Press.

Update: Jeffery's interview with Jonathan is here. Thanks, Tom.
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The photo of Thomas Meyer is by Reuben Cox.
Original content © 2006.

Another Note on Tom Meyer's Dao ...

When I was writing my first article on Tom Meyer’s new Dao, I was working from a Word file Tom had sent to serve until the hardcopy book would have time to arrive. Reading through, I came across a bit of wordplay that I enjoyed; it was in “chapter” seven. Here’s what I liked:

heaven lasts
and earth

a long time
heaven and earth

have been around
a long time

because they take
no interest

in themselves
they last

along time
this way the last

are first

The use of “they last//along time”, after the repetition of “long time” in the sixth line, struck me as a very bright strategy to avoid another repetition of “a long time,” and a deft hint as well at an almost topographical dimensionality of time that took it out of the abstract, no easy thing to do.

It wasn’t long before I wrote Tom to congratulate him on the figure, and just a short time after my email, I had a reply from him:

Alas, we changed that 'along time' to 'a long time' – the feeling was that things were getting a little too tricky. Foremost for me (in both the text itself and the books design) was a plain, straightforward approach. For the sake of that, I decided to let go of that bit of cleverness.

Perhaps nothing else in our correspondence clarified quite so well Tom’s scrupulous approach to his work.

Tom reads this Wednesday, March 22nd, at the BlackMountain College Museum + Arts Center, 56 Broadway in downtown Asheville. The reading begins at 7:00 PM.

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The poster for Tom’s reading was created for the Center by our very talented intern, Clare Hubbard, a student at Warren Wilson College. Click on the image for a larger version.
Original content © 2006.

Exploring The Dao With Thomas Meyer

Eugene O’Neill might never have written Long Day’s Journey Into Night, or any of his other dramas, except that tuberculosis forced him to bed, to a long reflective physical inactivity, and required of him a different life. Poet William Carlos Williams, felled by a stoke in 1951, had to learn to write all over again, but went on to produce The Desert Music, Journey To Love, and Pictures From Brueghel, three of his most moving testaments to the powers of relationship and of the imagination, in his final decade. For both of these men, experience of severe physical disability brought discovery or rediscovery of the vocation of writing; it drew them into deep creative work.

But, of course, Thomas Meyer didn’t think of these predecessors when he found himself flat on his back, unable to sit or stand, in 1989. He simply wondered what on earth he would now do.

Thomas had begun writing when still a teenager in Seattle, Washington, and submitted his first poem to a magazine when he was all of sixteen. He was already at that age a veteran of the arts, having been a child actor, beginning at age nine, in TV ads and summer stock theater. His determination to write persisted, even though, at that historical moment in Seattle

the shadow of Theodore Roethke loomed large. Classmates of mine had older siblings who'd been in his writing workshop where — we had heard stories — much emphasis was put on the name to write under, what magazine to send which poem to, and how to make your regional images appeal to a national audience. All of this, even then, struck me as another screwiness of America post World War Two. Writing, it seemed, wasn't about writing, it was about getting into print. Were we talking about poems or corn flakes? (from Tom’s article “On Being Neglected”)

It wasn’t uncommon, Tom amplifies, for Roethke, as he went through the roll of his students, to remark “Don’t worry, I’ll come up with a name for you.”

That local focus factored into his choice, when the time came, to go east for college. He wound up at Bard College, which had one of the premier programs in American literature in the 1960s and 70s, and was just up the Hudson from New York City. Bard faculty member Robert Kelly, himself a widely published poet and editor, helped him find his footing in the New York literary world, and by 1968, at age twenty-one, Tom was publishing poems in Clayton Eshleman’s great magazine Caterpillar; that’s where I first read him.

In the couple of decades following, Tom found audience and extensive publication for his poetry. His work with partner Jonathan Williams on Jargon Books brought him interaction with some of the most visionary writers and artists of the era, and extended his contacts. Gradually, though, publication came to mean less to him; it had never been a primary focus, and slowly became even less important. As he writes:

There were so many poets who wanted to get into print that by my late forties I felt I should step aside; in effect become neglected. I'd had more than a fair share of not wide but close attention; and at least three 'ideal readers.' So too, I'd been lucky, always having the time to write when I needed or wanted it. Perhaps that's why I think about being neglected the way I do. But who's to say that my luck isn't the result of always writing when I needed or wanted to? (again from “On Being Neglected”)

(Luckily for us, many of the poems from those lucky decades are collected in At Dusk Iridescent, published by the Jargon Society in 1999. There are some selections from it up at the Nantahala Review site.)

In the enforced immobility of the first days after his back injury (Tom writes from his home near Highlands: “It was one of those mysterious things. I had an exercise routine and somehow bent this way and not that, and wrenched the lower back, which was sort of painful the same day. But the next morning, at the bathroom sink, shaving, I bent to look in the mirror and WHAM! I was on the floor. Muscle spasm. And had to crawl back to bed, couldn’t stand upright for about five days.”), in those days of pondering, Tom found a project that spoke of the wisdom of inner stillness and provided new ways to assess his position in life, that provided new perspectives on the question of what, in fact, constitutes “success”? While he’d worked a bit with the I Ching, the great Chinese divinatory classic, one of the world’s oldest books, as a young man, he’d never found it particularly hospitable. Now, though, he did find it welcoming. “After a month or two, I had the amazing feeling of being embraced by something, of being held”. He’d been accepted, perhaps, into the fold of the ancient lineage of human imagination that the I Ching, that “crazy compendium of poetry, songs, legends, recipes, and sayings,” as Tom describes it, embodies. He’d not been interested initially in the I Ching’s divinatory aspect (its principle use, for millennia, has been divination), but he came to appreciate that, too, as “one of its many dimensions. Divinatory practice,” he says, “is a way to calm you down, to get you to stop thinking so things can work out.”

He also explored the other great classic of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching – or, as Tom, following contemporary conventions for transliteration, terms it, the Daode Jing. And he found it a text that spoke to him as well. “The Dao,” Tom says, “is of as profound an order as the I Ching, but it offers silence and the idea of a positive emptiness as a space in which something can happen.” For the next decade, as he slowly healed, unable for most of that time to sit for any extended period – he had to work standing at a high desk (“like a scribe”, he says) – he developed his understanding of these texts. He read the Dao every spring, all of it, character by character, one chapter a day, in Chinese. He gradually worked at translations, first of the I Ching, building a concordance of its many characters, some of them rare in contemporary Chinese, one found only in its ideograms, and then of the Dao. As he notes in the afterward to his version (now to see the broader light of day),“Though I tried [to translate it], I didn’t press too hard, heeding the [book’s] advice to look for and follow that inherent, natural course of things themselves.” The texts and his dictionaries became his constant companions, something he carried with him everywhere, like, he says, “a bag of needlework.”

As Tom’s translation emerged, he gradually found the voice of the text. As he notes in the Afterward,

The tone was conversational, not canonical. Honesty and simplicity foremost, rather than piety or complication. There were no themes, ideas per se. Following one upon another, things circled, darted away, appeared again, or vanished altogether, with the natural ease and bonhomie of good talk.

“Of course,” he adds. And that voice seemed to him consonant with the traditional story of the origins of the Dao, which, unlike the I Ching, is reputed to have had a single author, laozi – or, in the older, traditional transliteration, Lao-Tzu – though the name itself simply refers to an “old man”. Here’s Tom’s account of the story:

Many years ago an old man lived in the capital of a place called China. He was the emperor’s librarian and renown for having read everything there was to read. When the philosopher Confucius paid him his respects, he came away saying:

Birds fly. Fish swim. Animals run.
They can be caught, shot, or trapped.
But this old man is like an air-borne dragon.
He can’t be snared.

Then as now, things could not get worse, but did. Big troubles were afoot. Those with power abused it. Those without grew cunning and two-faced. The old man finally could stomach no more greed, dishonesty, or corruption. The time had come, he told himself, to get out of China.

He climbed upon an ox, and leaving behind what little he owned, headed west, toward the high mountains of another country. When he reached a gate that led up a steep pass, the border guard stopped him, and said:

I recognize you and cannot let you go until you tell me everything you know. Otherwise we will see all that is worthwhile swallowed up by all that is not.

The old man welcomed a rest. The sun almost down, a bottle of wine opened, the two sat in the little station hut. The guard listened as the old man told him what he knew, which he said was not much. In fact, the moon was still in the middle of the sky when he got up to leave.

He was never heard of, or seen again. The five thousand words spoken that night are all that is left of him. And that, in the mind of their speaker, was five thousand too many.

Tom’s now ready to emerge from his remote hermitage and share one of the results of his long undertaking, his translation of the great Daode Jing. On March twenty-second, at 7:00 PM, Tom will read from his newly published version at the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center (another of the Center’s extraordinary programs), and introduce it to the world.

For more information, visit the Center’s website or call 828-350-8484.

For more on Tom’s translation of the Dao, read on; the next post is a “test of translation” that looks at Tom’s version and compares it to previous translations – and provides some background on the text of the Dao as well.

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This post originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in Rapid River Art Magazine Vol. 9 No. 7, March, 2006. Original content © 2006.

The photo of Thomas Meyer is by Reuben Cox.

Thomas Meyer’s Daode Jing: A Test of Translation

One of the useful features of Clayton Eshleman’s great little magazine Caterpillar, published in the now long-ago nineteen sixties and seventies, was its “tests of translation”; the tests presented translations of a given text juxtaposed sequentially so that they might be compared. Thomas Meyer has done a new translation of the Daode Jing (or Tao Te Ching, to use the older transliteration), so it might be useful to provide such a test for his text, and discuss its premises.

Chinese, of course, is far removed in its orthography and syntax from any language spoken in the west, and so presents considerable difficulties for western readers. The first translation of the Dao into English to which I find reference, one by John Chalmers, appeared only in 1868; the great Scottish sinologist James Legge included another version in his Sacred Books of China series, published in 1891. Since the nineteenth century, though, notwithstanding the difficulties, many translations have been published, some as books, others, now, on the web. Over all, it’s one of the most often translated books in the world, a fact that’s a testament to the sensible recognition that it’s occupied a central place in Chinese thought for millennia, and has imbued the work of Chinese poets, writers and artists through the centuries. It’s arguably as fundamental to the Chinese imagination as the work of Plato has been to the western world – or as the King James Bible has been for English speakers since its relatively recent publication in 1611.

Unlike the I Ching, the other ancient Taoist classic that’s come down to us (it dates, by some reckonings, from as early as 2061 BCE), the Dao is said to have had a single author, Laozi (Lao-Tsu in the older transliteration). Western scholars, though, now favor the theory that the texts that compose the book were authored by several anonymous sages, or passed down through the oral tradition, and gradually collected to form the Dao as we know it. Perhaps someday we’ll know more.

The text for the traditional version of the Dao dates from the fifth century of our era, but in 1973 a much older text that contained most of the Dao, written on silk, was discovered in a tomb sealed in 168 BCE; it’s known as the Mawangdui text. In 1993 an even older partial text, brushed on bamboo strips that were gathered into bundles, was found in a tomb at Goudian (or Kou-Tien); from other material found in the tomb, it was clear that the tomb dated from the fourth century BCE or earlier. The sections it included were mostly very similar to the corresponding sections of the fifth century text (though the ideograms in which the language was written had shifted in the intervening centuries), but they were arranged, as were those of the Mawangdui text, in a different order. Most western translations, including Meyer’s, use the traditional arrangement of sections – or “chapters”, as they’re often styled – but a few, like Robert Henricks’ 1989 translation, follow one or the other of the older texts in presenting the sections which comprise the division of the text known traditionally as the de before those that comprise the dao.

For translations, I’ve used the site here, which has more than a hundred versions of the text in a score of languages, including Klingon; it provides fifty-eight versions in English. Its use of frames allows you to compare up to four texts at once in different languages, including multiple versions of the Chinese text, if you wish. The transcriptions of the translations are not always completely accurate, but do pay the site a visit if you really want to delve.

For obvious reasons of time and space, and because I’m in no present danger of becoming a competent Sinologist, I’ll look at just a couple of chapters here.

Let’s first check “chapter” 5 in the traditional text; it’s one for which there’s a surviving bamboo strip in the Goudian collection. At the left of the image, there’s a photo of the original bamboo strip text, right of that a transcription in traditional characters, and then a transliteration and definition in English.

Translator Thomas Cleary, from 1991:

Heaven and earth are not humane; they regard all beings as straw dogs.
Sages are not humane; they see all people as straw dogs.
The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows and pipes, empty yet inexhaustible, producing more with each movement.
The talkative reach their wits' end again and again; that is not as good as keeping centered.

Here’s Dartmouth professor Robert Henricks’ 1989 version from the Mawangdui text:

Heaven and Earth are not humane;
They regard the ten thousand things as straw dogs.
The Sage is not humane.
He takes the common people as straw dogs.

The space between Heaven and Earth – is it not like a bellows?
It is empty and yet not depleted;
Move it and more always comes out.

Much learning means frequent exhaustion.
That’s not so good as holding on to the mean.

And, for some real perspective, here’s James Legge’s version from 1891:

Heaven and earth do not act from (the impulse of) any wish to benevolent; they deal with all things as the dogs of grass are dealt with.
The sages do not act from (any wish to be) benevolent; they deal with the people as the dogs of grass are dealt with.
May not the space between heaven and earth be compared to a bellows?
'Tis emptied, yet it loses not its power;
'Tis moved again, and sends forth air the more.
Much speech to swift exhaustion leads we see;
Your inner being guard, and keep it free.

Now here’s Thomas Meyer:

heaven and earth play no favorites
all of us are nothing more than scarecrows

heaven and earth are joined by emptiness
like a flute wrapped in cloth

empty but never useless
a hollow music comes from

not much to say
nothing better than staying in-between

There are a couple of nice touches in Meyer’s version; first is the replacement of the “dogs of grass” or straw dogs (a conventional figure of speech, a variation on the proverbial straw-man of argument) with scarecrows (palpable, and having a more-than-rhetorical existence); and, second, the replacement of “bellows” by “flute”. The original term seems to have denoted “bagpipe”, if the literal translation of the ideogram pictured above is accurate, so both translations depart from a specific referential sense of the passage. “Flute”, though, captures the musical dimension of “bagpipe”, while “bellows”, which conveys its mechanical sense, does not – and is likewise an instrument of air.

Considering the text section by section ignores one of the most notable features of Meyers’ translation (I’ll get to that in a moment), but let’s take a look at another section, “chapters” seventeen through nineteen, traditionally read together:

Here’s the Henricks version:

17

With the highest kind of rulers, those below simply know they exist.
With those one step down—they love and praise them.
With those one further step down—they fear them.
And with those at the bottom—they ridicule and insult them.

When trust is insufficient, there will be no trust in return.
Hesitant, undecided! Like this is his respect for speaking.

He completes his tasks and finishes his affairs,
Yet the common people say, “These things all happened by nature.”

18

Therefore, when the Great Way is rejected, it is then that we have the virtues of humanity and righteousness;
When knowledge and wisdom appear, it is then that there is great hypocrisy;
When the six relations are not in harmony, it is then that we have filial piety and compassion;
And when the country is in chaos and confusion, it is then that there are virtuous officials.

19

Eliminate sageliness, throw away knowledge,
And the people will benefit a hundredfold.
Eliminate humanity, throw away righteousness,
And the people will return to filial piety and compassion.
Eliminate craftiness, throw away profit,
Then we will have no robbers and thieves.

These three sayings—
Regard as a text are not yet complete.

Thus, we must see to it that they have the following appended:
Manifest plainness and embrace the genuine;
Lessen self-interest and make few your desires;
Eliminate learning and have no undue concern.

I won’t quote as many versions of these sections as I did of the first passage, because I want to get to some features of Meyer’s book as a whole, but here are the same sections as translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, whose translation, the first version I encountered, came out in 1972 (a second edition appeared in the 80s, but I’m quoting from the first edition):

17

The very highest is barely known by men.
Then comes that which they know and love.
Then that which is feared,
Then that which is despised.

Who does not trust enough will not be trusted.

When actions are performed
Without unnecessary speech,
People say, "We did it!"

18

When the great Tao is forgotten,
Kindness and morality arise.
When wisdom and intelligence are born,
The great pretense begins.

When there is no peace within the family,
Filial piety and devotion arise.
When the country is confused and in chaos,
Loyal ministers appear.

19

Give up sainthood, renounce wisdom,
And it will be a hundred times better for everyone.

Give up kindness, renounce morality,
And men will rediscover filial piety and love.

Give up ingenuity, renounce profit,
And bandits and thieves will disappear.

These three are outward forms alone; they are not sufficient in themselves.
It is more important
To see the simplicity,
To realize one's true nature,
To cast off selfishness
And temper desire.

The Feng-English text presents the paradoxes at the heart of the passage in a fairly lucid, if canonical, voice. Re-reading it, I remember my first encounter with it, my initial sense that it had said something quite profound reasonably clearly. I’m still puzzled by the first lines of seventeen; “the very highest” what, I want to ask. The abstraction obscures the focus of the passage like a diaphanous fog, without conjuring up glimmers of further reference. Certainly, though, it has the advantage over the Henricks version of being almost colloquial, or perhaps oracular-colloquial; “sainthood” in the last section, for example, is better than Henricks’ “sageliness” (when’s the last time you encountered that?), and overall it’s a better English text.

Here’s Meyer’s, though, presented as he offers it, as a continuous text:

the best direction is barely felt
the next best is like a friend

fear follows after that
dismiss the last as useless

a lack of trust makes
things untrustworthy

quiet and in few words
finish what was begun

so that people say
it simply happened on its own 17

when the great dao is disabled
you need “goodness” and “understanding”

when wit and know-how are sold off
imitation is a necessity

when trust in the family gives way
“loving relations” are called for

when disorder and confusion take over
the “devoted” official appears 18

get rid of the spiritual and let go of wisdom
this will improve things a hundred times over

get rid of good deeds and let go of one’s duty
this will bring back needing and caring

get rid of well-laid plans and let go of advantage
then there will be no crooks or robbery

these three pieces of advice in themselves are not enough
so add to the above the following

admire what is plain and hold onto what hasn’t happened yet
think less of yourself and whatever it is you want 19

This deeply considered reading has among its many virtues that of extraordinary clarity – but it’s a clarity that echoes the paradox at the heart of the passage it presents. The lack of punctuation means that the intelligible structure of the passage depends on line and phrase – much as the meaning of a poem is likely to depend, in this post post-modern era, more on such paratactic strategies than on syntactic structures.

This section reveals the crucial dimension of Meyer’s translation I alluded to a minute ago: unlike others who’ve taken on the task, Meyer presents the Dao as one continuous text, with the section numbers off to the outside edge of the page. Instead of appearing to be a series of discreet oracular reflections, in other words, it’s one flowing account of the slippery, paradoxical nature of reality.

Meyer has clearly cast his translation in a voice quite different from those chosen by the other translators we’ve glanced at. He speaks of the voice he’s discovered for the Dao, what he calls the translation’s “rhetorical pitch”, in the afterward to his version:

The daode jing is table talk. An old man, not holding forth really, but just telling someone what he knew. After dinner, the dishes pushed aside, a glass of whiskey, a cigarette. Or a pub and a pint of beer, even. All throughout the Seventies, the poet Basil Bunting would visit Jonathan Williams and myself where we were living in the Yorkshire dales. This was like that. The tone was conversational, not canonical. Honesty and simplicity foremost, rather than piety or complication. There were no themes, ideas per se. Following one upon another, things circled, darted away, appeared again, or vanished altogether, with the natural ease and bonhomie of good talk.

It’s a convincing take (though I don’t personally see the sage with a cigarette – but perhaps a pipe!). Notwithstanding, though, the apparent simplicity and the casual nature of the presentation, this is durable chatter, words and phrases that work their way into mind and stay there. No periods, no commas – Meyer has freed the language of his translation from the boundaries of syntax to make what is essentially a contemporary poem, a subtle reading of subtle writ, one that’s fluid, follows shifting riverbeds of meaning, and so gets to the heart of the Dao –

best to be like water
always useful …

– a profound text, and a wonderful translation. It's one, I suspect, that I’ll visit often.

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Updated to correct the transcription of two of the translations.

Original content © 2006.

Posts in the Permanent Collection

Two posts archived here deal head-on with Robert Creeley's work:
Something Quite Different: A Farewell for Robert Creeley (published 2006), and
Robert Creeley: Here and Now (first published in 1979); they're the best place to start if you're interested in Creeley (or at least my engagement with his work).

In addition, a search of NatureS on "Robert Creeley" will turn up many other mentions of him, often in the context of discussions of Buffalo in the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, or considerations of other Black Mountain College poets.

Jonathan Williams was one of those Black Mountain College poets. He was born in Asheville, and lived much of his life about an hour and a half west of here, at Scaly Mountain. Posts on Jonathan include this appreciation of his work published just after his death in 2008; this post previews a showing of some of his photographic work; and another post provides production notes for the Wordplay show featuring Jonathan reading his work, live and in person, at Sylva's City Lights Books in 2005.

Articles on Thomas Meyer's 2006 translation of the daode jing can be found here, here, and here. Production notes for the Wordplay show that featured Tom reading his translation, as well as a selection of earlier work, will be found here, and the notes for the program featuring his reading of Kintsugi and other poems are here.

A Note on Jack Clarke discusses Charles Olson's Buffalo friend and fellow poet, who founded the Institute of Further Studies. There's look at some of Novalis' fragments here; the great German Romantic was among authors included in the Institute's unique Curriculum of the Soul.

I've discussed Bill Knott's poetry, as well as his aversion to music, several times - here and here and here, for instance.

Visual artist Joyce Blunk is featured in an article on her piece "Crown Conch"; there's also an interview with Joyce.

Guitarist Steve Kimock, a master of musical improvisation, is the subject of several posts, including this one and this one.

Wait, there's still more! Posts, for example, on Baby Beat Thomas Rain Crowe, and his group The Boatrockers, and poets Fred Chappell and Jim Applewhite.

Other possible attractions: a post on poetry and computers; another farewell, this one to west-coast surrealist poet Ken Wainio.

Over on Eden Hall, there are older posts about happenings at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, including one on Hazel Larsen Archer and the book about her work the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center published in 2006. There are several of her photos here.

Enjoy.

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Updated 2/19/2009 to include additional posts.